Savage didn't say anything for the first mile after Adachi handed me the bow, which for Savage counted as its own kind of alarm.
I turned the thing over in my hands as we walked, getting the feel of it the way I'd gotten the feel of every bow before it, running my thumb along the grain of the wood where it had been shaped rather than simply cut. It was lighter than the Lanternwood Bow by a fair margin, no glass string humming with banked mana, nothing about it that announced itself as anything other than what it plainly was: a good bow, made by someone who cared, given by a man I still didn't know whether to trust.
"You're really going to use a gift from him," Savage said finally, eyes fixed straight ahead down the road.
"It's a good bow."
"It's a bribe."
"Maybe it's both," I said. "Doesn't mean I have to decide what he is before I've even heard her side of it."
"You heard her side of it. Back in the cave. Crying, shaking, the whole performance." Savage's jaw worked once, hard, like she was chewing on something that didn't want to go down easy. "I've seen that performance before, Jon. I know what it looks like when it's real, and I know what it looks like when somebody's gotten very, very good at telling people what they need to hear to get free of something."
"Which one was it?"
"That's the trouble, isn't it." She said it flat, no heat in it at all, which frightened me more than if she'd shouted. "I don't know. I want to say I do. I don't."
We walked a while longer without talking, the road climbing gently through low scrub hills that hadn't seen rain in what looked like weeks, dust rising pale off our boots with every step and settling again slow behind us. A hawk circled somewhere off to the west, riding a thermal in slow lazy loops, and I watched it for longer than I needed to just to have somewhere else to put my eyes.
"Can I ask you something," I said.
"You're going to whether I say yes or not."
"Back there, with Adachi. You went past angry. That wasn't just anger at what he might have done to her. That was something older."
Savage's stride didn't change, but something in her shoulders went very still, the particular stillness of a person holding a full cup steady on purpose.
"My mother married a man who hit her," she said, after a while, in a voice with all the usual bite scraped clean off it. "Everyone in the village knew. Nobody said a word, because he was well liked otherwise, generous with his coin, funny at the tavern, the kind of man people build excuses for out of pure inconvenience. I was eleven the first time I understood what the sound coming through the wall actually was. I was fourteen the last time, because that was the year I got tall enough and strong enough to put myself between them, and after that he mostly left her alone, because it turns out even a bully does the arithmetic eventually on which fights are worth having."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry. Be useful with it." She glanced at me sideways, just once. "That's why I don't know what to do with Inari. If she's telling the truth, then somewhere out there is a girl who finally got brave enough to run, and I want to burn the whole road down behind her so nobody ever finds her again. And if she's lying, if Adachi's the one who actually got hurt in all this, then I just beat a man half to death for a crime he didn't commit, and that's not something I get to take back just because I felt righteous doing it." She exhaled, long and slow, through her nose. "I hate not knowing which version of the story I'm standing in. I'd rather know I'm the villain than not know at all."
"We'll find out," I said. "That's all we can actually promise anybody right now."
"Don't make it sound wise. You're seventeen."
"I know how old I am."
"Just checking you did," she said, and something in her voice had loosened by half a degree, which from Savage was practically an embrace.
We made camp that night in a shallow dip off the road, sheltered from the wind by a low ridge of rock that some traveler before us had clearly used for the same purpose, judging by the old blackened circle of stones already sitting there waiting for a fire. Savage got one going with the brisk, economical motions of someone who'd built a hundred of them in worse conditions than this, and I sat across from her with my knees drawn up and the borrowed bow across my lap, turning the day over in my head the way I seemed to be turning everything over lately, slow and unfinished.
"You're quiet," Savage said, feeding a thin branch into the flame.
"Thinking about Marrow," I admitted. "The name. What it'd actually mean, if it turned out to be him."
"Might not be," she said, same as before, though something in her tone had softened a fraction since the road. "But if it is. What do you even say to a man who left before you were old enough to remember his face?"
"I don't know. I used to imagine it a hundred different ways, back when I was young enough to still let myself imagine it at all. Gramps never talked about him much. Just enough that I always understood there wasn't anything good waiting behind the silence."
"There usually isn't," Savage said, and there was an old, tired weight sitting behind that sentence that told me she wasn't only talking about my father anymore. "Doesn't mean you don't go looking anyway. I went looking for mine, eventually. Found him drunk in a room that smelled like it hadn't seen daylight in a decade, and you know what he said to me when I told him who I was?"